Hi all,

Throughout the last few days there has been an uptick in arguments and turbulence throughout our site. This comes right at a time where we are onboarding new communities that are in danger of being banned by Reddit.

During this, we've seen that it would be beneficial to provide more clear communication around our decisions and stances on current issues. This post will be divided into two topics that have both come up: 1. BIPOC Comrades and Intersectionality and 2. Veganism

BIPOC Comrades and Intersectionality

We have an ongoing commitment to intersectionality. This will always be a continual process as we identify new opportunities for learning and process improvement.

Based on community feedback around BIPOC representation on the sitemod team, we have added two new sitemods who will bring additional BIPOC perspectives to the sitemod team. 

While we had BIPOC comrades on the sitemod team previously, they made the understandable choice to not state this identifying information publicly and we support them in their decision. We will continue to increase BIPOC representation on the sitemod team over the coming weeks.

There have been concerns of implicit support of racism amongst the mod team. We hope that looking through the modlog will prove otherwise. Although we can't get to rule breaking comments or posts immediately, we will never tolerate racism on our site, we're sorry about this and wish we could do more. We encourage everyone to continue reporting rule-breaking comments and posts so that they are more visible to moderators.

To reiterate, any posts or comments that are exclusionary to our BIPOC comrades are against our Code Of Conduct and will be removed. Individuals should especially not appropriate comparisons that aren't from their culture. Do not use appropriative comparisons like:

1. Do not use appropriative comparisons like chattel slavery or the holocaust if they are not from your culture.

2. Implying indigenous people are barbaric/mentions of "assimilation" or "evolving" their culture. These phrases are outright xenophobic and have a long history as a dog-whistle for settler-colonialism. They are not allowed. 

Our moderator team is made up of volunteers and works to remove reported content that violates our CoC as quickly as possible, but we are unfortunately not able to remove objectionable content instantaneously. Objectionable content remaining up following a report does not mean the moderation team endorses that content. We are continually working to build up the moderation team and number of volunteers.

Veganism

Hexbear is a platform for all leftist communities. As a part of this, we're partnering with a number of vegan communities on reddit who are migrating over to the site. The mods of these communities are intersectional and have a number of BIPOC comrades on their teams including indigenous comrades and we're excited to work with them. 

For those unfamiliar with the concept, veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to eliminate as far as is possible and practicable all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals. Veganism is about absolute liberation of our exploited and commodified animal comrades. Veganism is not a diet, although not eating meat and animal products is a common extension of this philosophy. 

We encourage vegans to post throughout the site. Our sitemod team is a mixture of vegans and non-vegans, as are the mods of the !food comm. The mods of that comm made the policy change of requiring pictures of meat to be marked nsfw following feedback from multiple comrades who were uncomfortable seeing meat pics. After examining feedback on this issue, the sitemod team has made the decision to support the !food mods agency as moderators.

The "NSFW" tag is very much a "catch all" at this point, although more specific content tags are planned for the future. We encourage all comrades passionate about helping us develop this feature to check out !hexbear@hexbear.net for how to get started with contributing.

Vegans are allowed to advocate for veganism, especially in their own comm. This doesn't constitute sectarianism, classism, racism, etc. and will not be actioned against as long as it does not break the site's code of conduct or a comm's rules.

As with any comm, individual posts and comments will need to be moderated. The diverse team of vegan mods already has experience navigating this from running large subreddits and will respond as these issues are reported. Bad faith generalizations of all vegans will not be tolerated, nor the delegitimization of trauma expressed by our vegan comrades.

In Conclusion

We appreciate the passion our community has for empowerment and intersectionality. As a team, we hope to consistently embody the communal standards we outline in our code of conduct. We feel these changes uphold our goals of intersectionality and left unity and will drive the site forward as a general, inclusive leftist space.

Thank you and viva la hexbear.

Hi there friends! Reposting our team's manifesto since the original post from months ago was scrubbed when its OP deleted their account.

This is based on the version from our repo and probably a bit rougher around the edges than what was posted initially, but it helps outline the goals and reasoning behind formally forking our project from Lemmy.

Our fellow Chapos,

The current rust backend has a lot of Technical-Debt™; we've made several critical changes that have let us scale to 10k+ users and had to put out a lot of fires on the way. These changes have also left us in a state where merging upstream Lemmy is a large job even if we would do it weekly to keep up.

We as a team feel we have hit a dead-end or brick wall with continuing to maintain the current backend in rust as-is while maintaining upstream compatibility. Additionally, there are several architectural changes we would like to make that would both require forking and a significant rewrite of the current codebase.

Since a rewrite is inevitable and rust/choice rust libs have shortcomings or simply aren't ready for maintaining a production load web server, we have decided to use a new language. On the human side, the "core team" feels that the current tech stack is painful or slow to work with, makes onboarding difficult, and has been a turn off from getting new contributors. So-

Goals

In the short/mid term we want to:

• Convert majority of client requests to the rest api away from websockets
• Build a v2 api with the goal of splitting the current request/response objects up (ie. make it possible to query smaller data sets so a User component isn't getting irrelevant data, basically make an actual modern/"standard" api)
• Use a mature query builder that allows rewriting the sql queries/joins to be sensible, not reliant on cross joins, can properly filter based on inputs etc

Why Rewrite?

In technical specifics

• Rust compile times are frustrating (30+ minutes per compile)
• Many Rust libs are not mature enough for a small team web server to be a good idea, nor is the query building/orm side without strict limitations

In human terms

• Some of us are facing severe burnout on Rust or don't find it fun for this project's specifics
• We're finding it difficult to keep contributing fixes because we have to code in a reactionary style and Rust does not lend itself to getting something quick done
• Rust learning curve is steep or the lang itself turns away new contributors

Why Typescript?

Technical:

• It offers typing/auto-complete/other goodies to JS
• The ecosystem has many mature libs web servers, middleware, querying, testing, documentation
• Iteration is quick and our BE/FE tech stack would be similar
• We do not face any optimization/performance issues that make compiled langs needed

Human:

• Most of us are familiar with TS/JS already
• Learning curve is small and we can maintain a codebase that is friendly to new devs or even someone new to coding
• The TS community is very friendly, welcoming and focused on accessibility. It's extremely fast growing and immensely popular for web projects- As such it offers the best chance to sustain the project via new members

Conclusion

Most importantly, we want this to be fun, even if that means putting in the work to fork and rewrite in a new language.

There will be new pain points, new tech debt, and many human hours of work to even bring this to current 1:1 functionality, but that is worth it if the end result is something we own, enjoy and can easily share.

We encourage everyone in the community who is as passionate about Hexbear as we are to pitch in and contribute to the project. Here's our getting started guide.

Thanks for reading and Viva La Hexbear!

:hexbear-shining: